While I was translating a medical text from Portuguese into English, it occurred to me there is not a correlation in ending between benign and malignant (the set normally used in medical contexts), cf. Portuguese/Spanish/Italian benigno x maligno, Catalan benigne x maligne, French bénin x malin, Romanian benign x malign.

Brazilian dude wrote:While I was translating a medical text from Portuguese into English, it occurred to me there is not a correlation in ending between benign and malignant (the set normally used in medical contexts), cf. Portuguese/Spanish/Italian benigno x maligno, Catalan benigne x maligne, French bénin x malin, Romanian benign x malign.

Brazilian dude

On the face of it, as these antonyms pair up, it would make sense to have similar endings, as in the examples you cite. On the other hand, in medicine benign growths and malignant ones are likely to have very different outcomes so why not have different endings?

Fortunately my own malignant growth hasn't been my ending. (This body wasn't big enough for the both of us!)

"Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once. Lately it hasn't been working."Anonymous